Typically, Buddhist-inspired forms of meditation invite us to observe the emptiness of all forms, whether those forms are objects in the world around us or we ourselves as subjects, as souls. Nothing abides, all forms are passing away, or changing into other forms as the old dissolve. Panta rhei, as Heraclitus put it: everything flows, everything streams. But what if, instead of trying to identify, paradoxically, with being nobody or being soulless, we see instead that the soul is not a being at all, but a becoming? What would it mean, then, not to be soul, but to become soul?

The ancient analogy likening souls to stars can help us here. Souls are like stars. Stars are not things, they are transformative happenings, alchemical events, streams of activity. Every second our Sun transforms 9 billion pounds of itself into light. In the half hour we spend together this morning, it will have burned up 15 trillion pounds of itself, releasing that mass as energy that streams to Earth to feed and sustain all life. 15 trillion pounds is equivalent to about 7 ½ thousand Golden Gate Bridges (the bridge weighs about 800,000 tons).

Souls are like stars. Consider this analogy in light of Emerson’s statement from his essay “Over-Soul”:

“From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.”

I invite you in our meditation this morning to consider your soul, not as a fixed identity that sets you apart from me, but as a streaming influence constantly transforming what is within you into something to be shared with others. The soul is what shines between us, what allows us to commune with each other. It is an outward flowing light, and an inward sensitivity to the light of others streaming in. Let’s become souls by becoming like stars; let’s let the light shine through us.

This image, says Tyson, gave birth to the cosmic perspective in the collective imagination. He traces the origins of the ecological movement to the emotional and metaphysical impact of this photo. “We thought we were exploring the Moon, but we ended up discovering the Earth.”

Tyson continues to elevate our mood to the contemplation of the power of All, the Universe, by quoting Galileo: “The Sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.” He becomes Space-time’s poet-seer when he says “the end of space is the beginning of time.”

It is only towards the very end of the interview that I start to feel resistance to what Tyson has to say about cosmology, i.e., the scientific and philosophical pursuit of the order of the universe. He describes human beings as “voyeurs” who merely “eavesdrop” on the cosmos. I don’t think his conception of consciousness is at all adequate. Human consciousness is never merely “looking on” at a universe “going on” without it. It is rather that consciousness is part of the goings on of the universe; consciousness is what we do, it is not an unchanging substance or a passive witness. We are participants, not onlookers. We don’t observe from outside like aliens, we are at home here, we can feel and know the universe from within the universe, because we are the universe feeling and knowing. I imagine Tyson would agree with me so far as it goes. But I think the old conception of a scientist or astrophysicst as someone who stands back and observes, trying to erase all influence their own activity might have on the activity they are experimenting upon, is no longer tenable. We need a better way of conceiving what scientists are doing when they produce knowledge of the cosmos. This knowledge cannot be other than the cosmos. It must be integral to it.

My fiance Becca Tarnas just launched the website for her archetypal cosmology consultation practice. Her approach to psyche-cosmos correlations could be understood as an extension of depth psychology beyond just the personal and (human) collective unconscious into the interplanetary unconscious. It is a form of psychoplanetary therapy. Check it out.

“The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky . . . . Everything in the world is full of signs. . . . All events are coordinated. . . . All things depend on each other; as has been said, ‘Everything breathes together.’”– Plotinus

I am excited to announce my archetypal astrology counseling practice, and the launch of my website ArchetypalPrism.com. The archetypal perspective has been a continual presence throughout my life, and I have been working intensively with astrology since 2011. The form of astrology I practice is known as Archetypal Cosmology and focuses primarily on the geometrical relationships between the planetary bodies of our solar system. I offer astrological consultations that explore both the natal chart—the position of the planets at the moment of one’s birth—as well as personal transits—the relationships formed between the continuous movements of the planets and the natal chart. If you…

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HERE is the interview. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I remember a wide-ranging conversation on everything from my own intellectual and spiritual development, to the relationship between science and religion, to the role of imagination and psychedelics in the philosophy of nature.

“Ritual for me is a kind of like serious play. It’s play that you take seriously. As play, though, it doesn’t have an end outside of itself. It’s not like work or labor then in that sense, where you might be doing something now that may be grueling and difficult in order to produce a finished product…with play its about what’s happening in the act of doing it. I think ritual should be understood in the same way. And I think in our modern context, those people that still do participate in religious ritual think of it as a kind of work where you’re trying to prove yourself as a dedicated member of this or that religion, you’re trying to look good in God’s eyes, or whatever, and by approaching ritual in that way you’re blocking what actually functions as sort of the saving grace that one is trying produce…

Bryant’s reflections on the paradoxes of materialism spoke precisely to some of the problematics emerging recently in a reading group I’m participating in at CIIS with Adam Robbert and others. We just finished Mark Taylor’s reader Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Prior to DiC we read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and prior to that Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. (Next is Deleuze and Guatari’s What Is Philosophy?). Bryant’s materialism is meant as a direct challenge to the authors excerpted in Taylor’s anthology. With Kant (with whom the reader begins), there began a line of thinkers committed to transcendental philosophy. This lineage has more recently been pejoratively renamed correlational philosophy by Meillassoux and other Speculative Realists. It may not be entirely fair to identify Derrida (with whom Taylor’s reader ends) as a transcendental thinker. But I do think I can say that, as a careful reader of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, his work must be understood as a respectful but nonetheless critical response to this tradition. You could almost say that Derrida’s texts were an attempt to out critique the critical (or transcendental) philosophers by bringing to attention that which is even more a priori than concepts and intuitions: namely, writing. As Derrida wrote in Of Grammatology, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”–usually translated as “there is nothing outside of the text,” but perhaps best translated as “there is no outside-text.” For object-oriented thinkers like Graham Harman and Bryant, Derrida is public enemy number one (though for slightly different reasons). For Bryant, Derrida must be read as a linguistic correlationist, as one who denies the reality of anything outside the contextual domain of semiogenesis. We must, of course, remember that the play of différance prevents an author from finally fixing the meaning of the text (I almost said “of their text,” but textual ownership is precisely what Derrida is taking issue with). Derrida’s correlationalism is not, then, the sort that would place all objects in relation to a transcendental subject, since as I understand his deconstruction of traditional metaphysics, the subject itself (along with the objects it represents) only becomes possible in and through writing. Nonetheless, meaningful signs, even if infinitely contextual, for precisely this reason only ever point to themselves. There is no “Great Outdoors,” as Meillassoux says, that writing might grant us cognition of.

Derrida owes much to Saussure’s binary semiotic theory. I prefer a different starting point in regard to meaning-making: the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s triadic semiotics redistributes meaning beyond human signs, inviting us to consider the various ways other beings interpret and refer to themselves independently of us. Peirce, and other thinkers in his lineage like James and Whitehead, seem to me to stand outside the framework of Bryant’s post. These thinkers qualify as what I called “ontological constructionists” in my original comment. Unlike “social constructionists,” it is not merely we human beings who create all meaning. Rather, all beings, in becoming-with one another (and so becoming-other than themselves), are generative of meaning. For this reason, Whitehead generalized the notion of “society” such that it included organized collectivities of any kind (not just humankind).

As Bryant frames the correlational paradox, any thinker claiming to be a materialist necessarily “proceeds through concepts.” This despite the fact that materialists understand themselves to be “[attempting] to grasp that which is other than the concept.” Bryant wants to place matter beyond and before all thought as “absolutely exterior” and unrepresentable. This is all fine and well. The clear and distinct concepts of reflective self-consciousness cannot in any way touch the darkness of materiality. But I’d like to suggest that attending to the imaginal tides of affect and aesthesis as they flow to-and-fro across the fractal edges of conscious experience may help bridge the otherwise gaping chasm between mind and matter. Attending only to thought and conceptuality, or to transcendental structures of intentional directedness toward the eidos of appearing objects, artificially widens the gap. Dwelling instead upon the way emotional vectors vibrate through and between bodies, we begin to realize that the old abstract categories of mind and matter no longer hold any water. They leak. By entering into an aesthetic–or better, poetic–rather than a conceptual time-space, we no longer need to shroud matter behind the representational mirages projected onto it by a mind which, as materialism would have it, can only be conceptualized inabsentia, as not present, as somehow both identical with and yet alien to materiality. I qualified the term “aesthetic” with “poetic” above, because it is all too easy to define aesthesis according to the misplaced concreteness, so prevalent among modern philosophers of both the empirical and rational schools, which has it that our primary form of sensory experience is of bare patches of qualia free of all relations. Whitehead called this mode of perception “presentational immediacy,” contrasting it with the more foundational mode of “causal efficacy.” When I refer to entering an aesthetic or poetic time-space, I mean attending again to the causality of sensuality, to the way aesthesis links us up with real currents of energy in our cosmic, biotic, and psychic environs. This is James’ radical empiricism, adapted by Whitehead following his protest against the bifurcation of nature. I’ve written about this in a short essay on the importance of Wordsworth’s nature poetry for Whitehead’s account of perception. For Whitehead, nature is “what we are aware of in perception” (The Concept of Nature):

“For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon. It is for natural philosophy to analyze how these various elements of nature are connected.

In making this demand I conceive myself as adopting our immediate instinctive attitude towards perceptual knowledge which is only abandoned under the influence of theory. We are instinctively willing to believe that by due attention, more can be found in nature than that which is observed at first sight. But we will not be content with less. What we ask from the philosophy of science is some account of the coherence of things perceptively known.

This means a refusal to countenance any theory of psychic additions to the object known in perception. For example, what is given in perception is the green grass. This is an object which we know as an ingredient in nature. The theory of psychic additions would treat the greenness as a psychic addition furnished by the perceiving mind, and would leave to nature merely the molecules and the radiant energy which influence the mind towards that perception. My argument is that this dragging in of the mind as making additions of its own to the thing posited for knowledge by sense-awareness is merely a way of shirking the problem of natural philosophy. That problem is to discuss the relations inter se of things known, abstracted from the bare fact that they are known. Natural philosophy should never ask, what is in the mind and what is in nature. To do so is a confession that it has failed to express relations between things perceptively known, namely to express those natural relations whose expression is natural philosophy. It may be that the task is too hard for us, that the relations are too complex and too various for our apprehension, or are too trivial to be worth the trouble of exposition. It is indeed true that we have gone but a very small way in the adequate formulation of such relations. But at least do not let us endeavor to conceal failure under a theory of the byplay of the perceiving mind.

What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream” (29-30).

“If energy were the underlying substrate of the universe, i.e., its ‘truth,’ and if emotion were the way in which it manifested itself to the mind, then the creative artist through his emotion would be apprehending this truth from within” (68).

So in summary, while I agree with Bryant’s criticism of the variety of transcendental, phenomenological, and (Saussurean) semiological philosophies of access for the way they reduce the mode of being of the non-human to that of the human, I do not think his bifurcated materialistic alternative provides us with a more coherent ontology. We’re left, instead, with irresolvable paradoxes (like the hard problem of consciousness, for example).

Unfortunately, the track I was to participate in was canceled due to conflicts with another conference. But I wanted to share my abstract since I hope to develop some of these themes in the future. This particular theme (teleology in archaeology) came up as I read Hodder’s great book Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship Between Humans and Things.

Abstract Proposal: XV Nordic TAG 2015

Title: On the Entanglements of Archai and Teloi: Towards a Whiteheadian Philosophy of Archaeology

Author: Matthew David Segall

Panel: Disentangling the Neolithic “Revolution” in Southwest Asia

Abstract: Whitehead defined philosophy as the critique of the abstractions of the special sciences, tasking it with the harmonization of these abstractions with our “more concrete intuitions of the universe” (SMW, 87). As one among the special sciences, archaeology tasks itself with the study of the presence of the past. It examines the traces of the past as they show up in the present. But the past never shows up in concrete experience to make itself available to scientific evaluation except in relation to particular conceptions of the future. In order to harmonize archaeology with our concrete intuitions of the universe, it is necessary to supplement the study of the presence of the past with the study of the absence of the future, i.e., teleology. Teleology is the study of the way the future leads on or lures the present toward its own latent potentialities. It concerns not what is, but what could or even should be. Although usually associated with religious cosmologies, it is clear that modern secular worldviews are no less teleological in orientation. Humans are inescapably future-oriented beings. It follows that archaeologists should take their imagination of the future explicitly into mind while studying the past, since the way humans imagine their future largely determines in advance how they come to interpret their past. My paper draws upon Whitehead’s process-relational “ontology of organism” to argue that ecologizing the philosophical foundations of archaeology requires not simply coming to terms with the agency of nonhuman things, but also situating the study of the past within a universe of things (human and non-) for whom the creative lures of the future are just as influential as the settled facts of the past. My hope is that Whitehead’s heterodox conception of teleology may be of some use to archaeologists.

My track at this year’s International Whitehead Conference is titled “Re-imagining Late Modernity’s Reductive Monism” and is situated within the umbrella section called “Alienation from Nature: How It Arose.” Other participants in my track include Elizabeth Allison, Sean Kelly, Richard Tarnas, and Brian Swimme. I hope to have the schedule and abstracts for everyone’s contributions posted by the end of the month.

For my part, I want to articulate an alternative to modernization. Following Bruno Latour, I’ll call it ecologization. The tentative title for my talk is:

“Panexperientialist Pluralism or Eliminativist Monism?: Towards the Ecologization of Philosophy”

A brief summary of what I’d like to cover:

“A philosophic outlook,” writes Whitehead, “is the very foundation of thought and of life…As we think, we live.” It is the assumption of this paper, and this entire conference, that ideas matter. Philosophy is not merely mental entertainment. On the contrary, it is a matter of life and death. As Whitehead argues, the dominant philosophy of every age “moulds our type of civilization” (MoT, 63). Modern philosophy, largely shaped by Descartes’ understanding of the relationship (or lack thereof) between the free human spirit and an entirely mechanical nature, has been thoroughly critiqued by contemporary environmental philosophers for its ecologically disastrous side-effects. Most serious thinkers no longer consider dualism to be a “living option,” as William James would say. Descartes’ early modern dualism split spirit from matter so thoroughly that it left no room for life. The currently unfolding mass extinction is not at all surprising as the outcome of such a philosophy. To Whitehead’s statement we must add the corollary statement: As we think, we die.

Thanks to Darwin and 160 years of the evolution of Evolutionary theory, it has been made abundantly clear that human beings were not dropped onto this planet from heaven, but instead share a genetic origin with every other species of organism on earth. We also share a destiny: Humans, like many other megafauna, are faced with imminent extinction. We are not, in fact, alienated from Nature. Our fortunes rise and fall with Hers (and She is not at all the unified, ahistorical, steady-state machine we have for several hundred years suspected). Given the severity of our situation, the Whiteheadian philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour has provided us with an ultimatum: either continue the disastrous path of modernization, or change the course of civilization entirely by ecologizing the human endeavor.

Now that dualism has been largely discredited, many proponents of modernization are seeking philosophical justification by defending eliminativist or reductionist forms of materialistic monism. My paper will attempt to bring the ecologically oriented Whiteheadian alternative of panexperientialist pluralism into distinct relief by contrasting it with late modern eliminativist monism. Reductive monism is the confused result of the incoherent Modern Constitution that Latour so thoroughly critiqued and re-constructed in We Have Never Been Modern (1993). In their rush to reductively naturalize everything in theory, eliminativists have neglected the extent to which the techno-scientific practices they worship have in fact only ever succeeded in multiplying the number of nature-society hybrids. The more they claim to have acquired pure knowledge of the human brain (cleansed of any contamination by culture or the dreaded psychology of common folks), the more these hybrids proliferate. This eliminativist attempt at (what Whitehead would call) a heroic feat of “explaining away” is itself little more than a form of political posturing, an attempt to crown oneself the victor of the progressive march toward a finally, truly Modern world. If anyone is confused, it is the eliminativists, since at least all the poor common people with their unscientific and pre-theoretical folk psychology escape the embarrassment of the blatant contradictions between theory and practice that plague the former. If our civilization is to have a future, it cannot be achieved by such polemical grandstanding. We need a more diplomatic method, which is precisely what an ecological and pluralistic ontology makes way for.

We can begin to ecologize our civilization by first ecologizing our philosophy. Ancient and modern philosophies alike have sought unity, substantiality, and eternity. In contrast, an ecological philosophy acknowledges the tendency of things to proliferate, to process, to interpenetrate. An ecological philosophy is a pluralistic and historical philosophy. Historical because there is nothing—no creature and no relationship—that did not come to be in the course of evolutionary time. Historical becoming is not reserved for human society alone. Humanity is itself just the most recent chapter in a multi-billion year geostorical cascade of complex and compounding effects. Pluralistic because our seeming “universe” is really teeming with swarms of undomesticated teloi. It is a pluriverse full of erotically charged organisms enmeshed in irreducibly complex networks of energetic transaction. In Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, physics and chemistry are no longer considered to be descriptions of the meaningless motion of molecules to which biology is ultimately reducible, but rather themselves become studies of living organization at ecological scales other than the biological. In other words, ecology replaces physics as the foundational science. Value-experience replaces valueless matter as the most basic ontological category.

A very wide-ranging and far-reaching conversation. Economics, the “ownership theory” made and sold to students at the London School of Economics and many other Universities around the neoliberal globe, is put on trial by both Latour and Williams. Latour goes so far as to stick a poison label on it.

About 10 minutes in, Williams’ discussion of the two kinds of knowledge reminded me of Whitehead’s line from The Concept of Nature about the bifurcation of nature (the line Latour is always quoting):

What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.

I attempted to link Plato and Socrates’ invention of philosophy to the psychedelic mystery cult at Eleusis, and interpreted Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as the mythic expression, not of a dualistic idealism that separates appearance from reality (what is usually called “Platonism”), but of a non-dual ontology of creative aesthesis.

Clark wrote a piece back in 2010 for the NYT philosophy column “The Stone” called “Out of Our Brains” that is well worth a read. It is easy to become so transfixed by the way our consciousness is embedded within and potentially enhanced by an increasingly ego-pandering (and potentially self-destructive) technological media environment that we entirely forget about all the psychophysiological contributions made by the far more ancient biological and astrological environments from out of which we and our toys emerged. “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious,” as Whitehead says. What is obvious is that the technoindustrial economy is situated within the dymanics of the Earth system as a whole, that all of our machines and media are ultimately subject to the cosmological energy flows coursing through our planet as it wanders around the Sun.

As Clark says, the novelties of late capitalism, like smartphones and laptops, do certainly extend and augment our our cognition. But ecological and cosmological modes of mind extension pre-date and override these more recent cognitive constructs. Our late modern consciousness may have become largely technologized, but to the extent that we remain grounded on this Earth beneath that Sky, our cognitive bills must still be paid not simply in the currency of skull-bound neurons or handheld smartphones, but in that of the ecodelic chemicals and archetypal energies we share with the other organisms in our local, planetary, and interplanetary ecologies.

The photo is from last summer’s Burning Man festival, taken by Zipporah on Sunday morning while I sat in the Temple of Grace contemplating my life’s loves and losses. Later that night, the Temple collapsed in upon itself like a curtsying ballerina after burning for fifteen short minutes.

…….

I read the following prayer at the opening of a small medicine ceremony I participated in the night of the Winter Solstice. The Solstice prayer and the Temple photo seem to me to share a similar archetypal character.

Tonight we celebrate one of the deepest celestial mysteries to stir the sacred senses of our still youthful species. We watch in wonder as the Sun’s southward journey comes to a standstill. We honor the darkness this provides on this, the longest night in the history of the Earth. Tonight the Sun dies so that in three days it may be reborn to travel north again toward Spring. We give thanks for the balancing of Light and Dark, a mixture from out of which all Life springs forth. We trust in the Great Cosmic Cycle of Death and Rebirth, in the eternal rotation of the spheres of Heaven and Earth.

Day and night sides of Earth at the instant of the December 2014 solstice (2014 December 21 at 23:03 Universal Time). Note that the north polar region of Earth must endure 24 hours of night, while the south polar region gets to bask in 24 hours of daylight. Image credit: Earth and Moon Viewer

We trust that the Sun will return to shorten the night and to warm the Earth. We give thanks to the earth for faithfully receiving the luminous breath of the Sun, for giving birth through its sacred chemical kiss with the Sun to all plants and bacteria, fungi and animals. We honor the Earth’s sister, Luna, the Moon, who tonight will go down with the Sun on his journey through the underworld , granting us an even deeper plunge into darkness.

This is the longest night in Earth’s history because of the tidal deceleration caused by the Moon’s gravitational influence. As Earth’s rotation slows, she drifts ever so slightly further away from us, her longing unable to overcome the momentum flinging her away. It is symbolic of the tragic beauty giving meaning to all change, to all time. As the Sun enters Capricorn, we honor Saturn, Father Time, who rules over all finite things. Adrift amidst these great cosmic cycles, we gather together to give praise to our ancestors: to the stars overhead whose sacrificial deaths made our lives possible; to all the Earth-beings underfoot, who feed and clothe us; to the first human inhabitants of this land, the Ohlone indians, whose remains dated to 5,000 years ago can still be found buried beneath the pavement of Berkeley just west of this ceremony; and we thank the future beings who will be here after us. We thank them for continuing the evolutionary journey despite our generation’s disrespect for and childish treatment of Earth and her creatures.

We ask forgiveness for our forgetfulness, our irresponsibility, our misguided pride. We humble ourselves before all beings, past, present, and future. We plant ourselves as seeds in the soil of time and look ahead, guided by the Great Mystery toward which all beings are called. We offer ourselves for this Great Work. May we be partners with Levity/Light and Gravity/Darkness in their sacred marriage.

Hard to disagree with too much of what Pinker and Goldstein say about Reason. Yay Reason, right?! They also make a very persuasive case for (neo)liberal capitalism. Pinker’s bit about empathy was a nice reprieve, but Goldstein shut him up fast by recounting Reason’s historical march toward the Good. In the end, I prefer Schelling’s, Hegel’s, or Marx’s mythologies of Reason to P. and G’s. Then there is Whitehead’s stab at a history of Reason, which I’m still trying to make sense of.

But do we really still need to bash religion, as they do at the end? What is P. and G.’s video really preaching (and every TED video, really) but that Reason (which all too often is reduced to science and technology) must become our new religion? Fine. Let’s praise Reason! But what is Reason? Let’s not pretend it is simply logic and objectivity that drives us to be reasonable. If Reason is to drive us anywhere, it must call upon our feelings and our desires. Reason without desire is aimless, impotent; without feeling, it is dumb and blind. Our rational and emotional natures must work in concert for life to be possible. When P. and G. joke about getting rid of religion, they pretend that we could be rational (i.e., have mastered our thinking) without also having come into right relationship with our feelings and our desires. Religion is an activity primarily concerned with finding viable ways of relating to the pain and to the love of life, and also to the pain of love, and yes, to the love of pain. In some Christian traditions this whole complex perichoresis of life, love, and pain is nicely summed up in the word (and story of Christ’s) Passion. Modern societies have always needed religious practices and discourses in order for Reason to continue to believe in itself as the new God. Today we still need religious practices and discourses to remind us that Reason itself is a work of love freely carried out. Religion is what allows us to relate to love and to pain in public, communally. It is only modern Enlightenment liberalism that has privatized religion, where it festers still today in parts of America. We don’t need more “private” religion based on personal dreams and wish-fulfillment. We need collective rituals and planetary liturgies that form cross-cultural church communities–that is, that form planetary political bodies–to help us convince each other to decommission our nuclear arsenals and stop treating the animals we happen to think are tasty like soulless machines. Reason needs religion to put its ideas into heartfelt action.